(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. is seeing early signs that the American consumer is bouncing back even as unemployment hovers close to the highest level since the 1940s.
While consumer defaults in certain loan products tend to track the jobless rate, “the performance that we see in those delinquency buckets is meaningfully better than what you would've expected with unemployment anywhere close to these levels,” JPMorgan Co-President Gordon Smith said Tuesday at Morgan Stanley's Virtual U.S. Financials Conference.
Of the 1.5% of JPMorgan customers who asked for forbearance on credit-card bills, roughly 80% have made payments, Smith said, something “that's a positive.” The bank also is starting to see an increase in interest for auto loans and mortgages after volumes slumped in the first few weeks of the pandemic.
“At this point,” Smith said, “I feel much more optimistic than pessimistic about what the next number of quarters are going to look like.”
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